[labster]

The paper defines what it considers a catastrophe quite well, you should read it! As a climatologist I always appreciate more investigation into the possibilities of future climate, even those I consider unlikely.

What I did say is that a lot of bad effects are already happening. Talking about climate science used to be like being the mythical Cassandra. But now it’s worse: the mass deaths and migration has already begun, and people still deny the evidence all around them that the predictions have already come true.

If there was an industrial accident where a chemical got released and a million people around the factory all died, that would be a catastrophe, right? Okay, a million people scattered around the world die from air pollution every year. Does the point source make it somehow a bigger tragedy in the first example? Yes, I know that without energy even more people would die, but a million deaths that we have all the technology to avoid is still a catastrophe. Regional famines leading to civil war and migration have already happened. Heat deaths in the thousands in Europe this year. Maybe I’m weird that my threshold for catastrophe is so low.